The new variant of Omicron Covid is likely becoming dominant in South Africa and is driving a rapid rise in new infections across the country, health officials said.

In South Africa, which was the first country to report the highly mutated variant, 8,561 new coronavirus infections were recorded in the latest daily figures, about double the 4,400 cases confirmed the previous day.

Although only a limited number of positive tests have been analyzed, the country's National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has said that more than 70% of all genomes of the virus it sequenced last month have been of the new variant.

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"There seems to be a prevalence of Omicron across the country," NCID Professor Anne von Gottberg told a World Health Organization news conference on Thursday.

"The numbers are increasing very, very quickly. We are up to 8,000 (daily cases), I think today we will reach 10,000."

Designated as a 'variant of concern', Omicron has now been detected in at least 24 countries around the world, according to the WHO, with at least 32 cases identified in the UK so far.

On Thursday, India confirmed its first cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant in two people who traveled abroad.